Nowicki Michał & Nowicka Katarzyna

Nowicki, Michał Nowicka, Katarzyna Michał Nowicki, his wife Katarzyna and their four-year-old daughter Maria lived in the small village of Sokolniki near Złotniki (Podhajce County, Tarnopol District, today in Ukraine). The family was poor, with Michał Nowicki working at home as a weaver. In late 1942, they agreed to shelter first seven-year-old Fela Flaszner, and later also her parents, Markus (Mordechai) Flaszner, his wife Rozalia (Szoszana), and Markus’ thirty-year-old sister, Regina Szer, and brother-in-law, Jakub. The Flaszners had been a rich family in Złotniki where they owned a large farm and wholesale tobacco business. In Autumn 1942, Jews from Złotniki, including the Flaszners, were forced to move to the ghetto in Podhajce. Markus Flaszner, the father, contacted the Nowickis who agreed to hide his daughter Fela. During one of the murderous operations against the Jews in the Podhajce ghetto, the Flaszners and Szers managed to escape and also went to the Nowicki family in Sokolniki. A shelter was dug in the part of the house that was a cowshed. Mattresses were placed there on which the Jews could lay down or barely sit. The Nowicki couple provided them with food. Upon the arrival, both families handed their belongings over to their hosts for partial sale. As the Nowickis’ material situation appeared to improve, the neighbors became suspicious that they might be hiding Jews. On one occasion, their daughter Maria brought her friends to the cowshed to prove that there were no Jews hiding there and asked, “Well, where do you see Jews here?”. The Flaszners and Szers stayed in the Nowickis’ home for 14 months from the beginning of 1943 until the Red Army came to the area in April 1944. After the war, the Flaszners moved to Legnica. Michał Nowicki mysteriously disappeared shortly after the war, and his wife and child moved to the village of Wągrowiec, near Poznan. The families stayed in close touch and visited each other often, until both Jewish families immigrated to the new State of Israel in 1950. Fela Flaszner visited the Nowickis in 1959 and then again visited Maria (then, Widzińska) in 1994, together with her husband. On May 25, 2005, Yad Vashem recognized Michał Nowicki and Katarzyna Nowicka as Righteous Among the Nations.